President Obama's plan to fight cancer

The below excerpt was taken from: http://www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/women/

Ovarian cancer is the fourth-leading cause of cancer-related death among women in the United States. Because of the lack of early symptoms or a proven screening test, ovarian cancer also has the highest mortality of all cancers of the female reproductive system. President Obama was an original co-sponsor of Johanna's Law, a piece of legislation signed into law in January 2007 that will educate women and increase awareness of ovarian cancer. The President has also supported efforts to combat breast cancer, another leading cause of death among women. He helped pass legislation in the Illinois State Senate to expand insurance coverage for mammograms.

So, the president plans to deal with the 4th leading cause before the first leading cause, which is lung cancer?

Stephanie submitted the following to the Citizen's Briefing Book:

Perhaps no public health policy area is more critically in need of transformation than lung cancer. For decades lung cancer has been the leading cancer killer and to date, no President has ever demanded accountability and change.
Lung cancer continues to be the biggest cancer killer in every ethnic group, taking more lives each year than breast, prostate, colon, kidney, melanoma and liver cancers combined. Yet lung cancer continues to be allotted the least research funding per death of all the major cancers.

Most new patients are diagnosed so late that they die within the first year. I am one of the "lucky" ones, having hit that first year milestone. Lung cancer hits current, former and never smokers. I happen to be a never-smoker diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer fifteen months ago (with no other risk factors, nor a family history of any cancer), and I have to work deliberately every day to not convey to my two small daughters the fear I have about leaving them motherless. I now know many mothers who are planning for their departure from their families due to this horrible disease. About 25,000-30,000 never-smokers die each year of this disease (just this sub-group is more than die of leukemia, lymphoma, liver or ovarian cancers)! Yet patients continue to be blamed for their disease, and the stigma of smoking is still being used to hide the neglect.

No one deserves lung cancer, smoker or not, but in order to understand how dramatically misplaced the blame that stands in our way, the public must realize that the enormous group of people dying from it are quite diverse--one can't form the mental image that he may desire in order to justify the continued ignorance of the true impact of this disease.

Over 160,000 people die annually from lung cancer. In fact, it kills twice as many women as breast cancer. Eight years ago, a federal study group warned the National Cancer Institute that lung cancer research was being funded far below its massive public health impact. The Surgeon General even called lung cancer in women an ‘epidemic’.”

Yet nothing has changed. Lung cancer “policy” has failed. Changing this will require an increase in research funding and more: It needs a commitment, a comprehensive plan of action and a sense of urgency.

Please set a firm goal for your administration: a 50% reduction in lung cancer mortality by 2015. Thank you.

I don't think we'll ever know for sure, but I hope Stephanie's entry made it into the President's Briefing book. Don't get me wrong, I want a cure for all cancers, but to continue to neglect the number 1 cancer killer seems well... neglectful!